Project Love
"If a thing loves, it is infinite" William Blake:
In this episode of Love and Philosophy, Andrea engages with Clive Grinyer, a renowned industrial designer and the director of Project Love. The discussion centers around how design can be a catalyst for fostering love, empathy, and compassion in society, and how this is a form of collective cognition. They explore various innovative projects, including a conversational bench, a heat map app, and a secular gravestone for natural beauty spots. The conversation delves into the philosophy behind design and how it influences our daily interactions and emotions. Grinyer shares insights from his extensive experience and highlights the transformative impact of design thinking in both personal and societal contexts.
Watch the video with powerpoint here.
00:00 Introduction: The Power of Design
01:17 Welcome to Love and Philosophy
01:43 Introducing Clive Grinyer and Project Love
06:19 Exploring Love Through Design
07:17 Defining Love and Design
21:39 Innovative Projects and Concepts
28:59 Community and Societal Impact
35:47 The Social Impact of Design
35:51 Designing for Sustainability and Economic Viability
36:01 The Complexity and Perception of Design
36:19 The Role of AI in Design
36:59 Technology and Human Experience
37:19 Design in Everyday Life
38:16 The Evolution of Technology Design
39:22 Emotional Design and User Experience
40:25 Project Love: Designing for Compassion
01:02:00 Empathy in Design
01:04:39 Future Directions and Community Building
https://www.theprojectlove.com/
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About Clive:
"Clive Grinyer is an internationally renowned designer who has led global design teams at Samsung, Cisco, Orange and Barclays, worked at design consultancy IDEO, and was co-founder of the design company Tangerine. Starting as a product designer he has moved across digital, customer experience and service design and was Director of Design for the UK Design Council. As Head of Service Design at the Royal College of Art, he pioneered design as a tool for social impact, shaping how we respond to the environmental crisis and develop life services including financial and healthcare. He is an advisor and delivers executive training to companies including Bosch, the Dorchester Collection of hotels, and the Bank of England. Clive was a trustee of the Royal Society of Arts, Chair of the Design Business Association Effectiveness awards and visiting professor at the Glasgow School of Art. He is currently based in London."
TRANSCRIPT:
Project Love: If a Thing Loves with Clive Grinyer
Clive Grinyer: [00:00:00] how might design foster greater love between ourselves and across society? Possibly one of the biggest and most interesting briefs I've had.
And could we begin to detoxify society? A tough call, but could we look at that at least?
I have to tell people, you know, every single thing around us. It's designed, it's a bunch of decisions that humans make, and it's not just the designer who makes them.
I think in some ways that's very true. We are moving design as a discipline forward, though really our objective is to try and show the world how, how we can create things that foster love.
I basically created a secular gravestone that you put in places of natural beauty. So people in many different cultures, you know, choose a place perhaps that was important to them and their loved one to scatter their ashes after they passed. And this becomes a place you can deliberately do that in a place of natural beauty.
Everything around us should be [00:01:00] ingrained with love. I think it would make a big difference.
if you were going to design something, you're not, you're not doing it for yourself. You're doing it for someone else. And if there was one thing I would say to every decision maker, you know, it's not about you.
Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. I'm so glad you're here today. We've had a few heavier podcasts lately. This one is a little lighter, but still a very serious subject. Some of you know I'm very interested in design, how we design things like cars, motorcycles, bicycles, cities, and so on, and I'm very interested in how that actually is a form of thinking or how it influences or sets the parameters for our cognition.
Cognition being both our emotion, our thinking, our memory. Even the ways we are together. So today's episode is coming out of that interest and it's with Clive Grinyer, who's a very [00:02:00] famous industrial designer and was head of the Royal College of Art in London, for example, and he's worked with big companies, global design teams at Samsung's, at Orange and Barclays.
You can look him up. There's a lot of good stuff to find. But he's now doing this project called Project Love, and it's based in London. It's a global design community. They're trying to develop projects that foster love across communities and society. He's gonna tell us about that, so I'm not gonna do too much of an intro, but he does tell us about some very interesting projects that they have.
For example, a bench that's positioned in a certain way that promotes conversation, a framing mechanism that helps you see the landscape differently. It's been very powerful. One of the projects I've thought about a lot since Clive and I talked was an app that he mentions. it's basically a heat map and you can touch the screen at the same time that others are touching it, and you can all see who's touching it in real time.
So you could be anywhere in the world and more or less [00:03:00] touch hands or touch fingerprints with someone that's also anywhere else in the world. And I just think that's really quite beautiful. If I think of how many people are. Separated all around the world right now. Even you and I listening to this, we could actually touch fingers right now or people in your family that you haven't seen, people in war zones.
There's just something about it. These ways of thinking about technology is being able to connect us in new ways. And thinking about the objects that surround us in our everyday life from a different perspective, a loving perspective, one that's not addictive and based on trying to get likes and follows and so forth.
In some of my other writings, I talk about this a lot, trying to move away from complexity of optics and towards the complexity of love where we just shift just a little bit, Just a slight cognitive turn about our everyday life and what's really possible in the way we interact with one another, but also with our objects and just asking what path are we on?
What path do we really wanna be on? [00:04:00] Are we making the decisions that are orienting us in that way in terms of how we design our worlds, our cities, our technologies, our objects? William Blake, as you know, is one of my favorite presences in the world, even though he's been gone a long time, poet and artist, and he has a saying, if a thing loves it is infinite.
I think he wrote that in the notes of a book maybe or something. I've, it's just something I've thought of for a long time. If a thing loves it is infinite. I actually wrote a book about the Volkswagen Beetle as an object through time, and I wanted to call it if a Thing Loves.
But of course, random House didn't like that idea. But in any case, I still think it would've been good because I really think our objects become extensions of our feeling for us in the moments that we're using them, and they also hold our stories over time. So these are real opportunities to connect with one another, to learn about each other's stories, to open portals into other pathways.
So I'll leave it at that. [00:05:00] I also just wanna tell you, I hope you're having a beautiful beginning to your spring, finding joy in the small things in your relationships, finding a way to stay focused on what matters each day. And I hope you enjoy this talk. I'm sending you a lot of love. This talk's a little different.
He's gonna do a presentation and. You can find the visuals of that presentation on the YouTube channel. You don't really need them. You can listen to it without seeing the visuals, but if you get a chance, do go there and have a look so you can see some of the projects but he describes it really well.
And then we have a nice chat right afterwards about the themes that he brings up in his short presentation. So thanks for being here. Thanks for joining the YouTube channel. Thanks for joining the substack. Thanks for the emails. Thanks for the good reviews and stars.
I'm just gonna have faith that this podcast finds whoever it needs to find out there. I. and I hope that wherever you are, you find whatever you need today in whatever source it may be. Because it's really important what we read, what we look at, what we say to [00:06:00] one another. All these little things really matter.
it's part of this revolution or this cognitive turn that I think we're all making together right now, even though seems rather crazy in the world. Okay, let's talk about project love.
Audio Only - All Participants: Hi Clive. Thanks for being here today on Love and Philosophy. So, we're going to talk about Project Love and Design for Love and to get us started, I think you're going to do a little presentation, maybe?
Clive Grinyer: Well, I would love to do a presentation, and thank you for inviting me to talk with you, by the way, and for your interest in Project Love. I think probably the easiest way to paint, um, the picture of everything we've been doing over the last year or so would be to give you a quick presentation. I'm quite a visual person, and also it reminds me of what I want to say.
So, I'm going to share my screen.
Okay. So, [00:07:00] hopefully everyone can see um, our logo, Project Love.
It was actually quite an important part of the project, was creating visual assets and an identity and even a website, which allowed people to access our thinking and and the tangible outputs of this project. But the Core idea is that we wanted to explore how design could be an agent for empathy, compassion and love.
So one of the things we do did in this project very early on was trying to find what we meant by love because love is definitely one of those words that has many meanings for many people. As does the word design. Indeed, design means many things to different people. So, um, when I did this in September, as you can see, it was 10 months after we'd started.
and this presentation was actually around the London Design Festival where we exhibited a lot of the work over four days very successfully. So we were a community of designers that I pulled together. [00:08:00] My background is the running service design at the Royal College of Art, so many of the designers that I pulled together were fairly recent graduates from a particular course called service design, which designs experiences, all the touch points that we might have.
And, um, We wanted to, we were asked by Fetzer, a U. S. organization, how might design foster greater love between ourselves and across society? Possibly one of the biggest and most interesting briefs I've had. I mentioned the Fetzer Institute. They are an institution, um, one of those great U. S. philanthropic institutions that has a large fund that they use for, for good.
And they were exploring. the topic of love and they had talked to lots of philosophers and academics about love and they came to me through my role at the RCA, Royal College of Art, to [00:09:00] ask if we could make actions, the fostering of love more tangible. They saw design as something that took research, perhaps took insights, took creativity and made something from it.
And they felt this was the right time to try and make something about love. They wrote an incredible brief. They talked about collaboration, designing and prototyping and testing artifacts and rituals, which is very interesting, that catalyzed many dimensions of love. They talked about cross cultural shared experiences and rituals, um, things that were accessible to people of all capabilities and abilities, and this aim to counter the toxic and transactional ways people connect.
They talked about fueling the fire of love in daily interactions. Virtually none of those words normally appear in a design brief, so it was very, very [00:10:00] exciting topic to take on and bring together our community of designers. The first thing we did was, was dig a little bit deeper into what those words might mean, and we added the word interaction, because we live in a very digital world.
And part of that brief was to bring love into the 21st century, you know, the way people interact now. So we looked at artifacts and we discovered the Welsh love spoon, which, um, was an item that was crafted by young men 200, 300 years ago in the country of Wales, part of the United Kingdom.
And this artifact was it was a period of very poor economic, um, times. People were out of work, didn't have much money. They would craft these spoons and, and give them to a female in their local village as an act of love, as an act of potentially betrothal. And we would always laugh, they would [00:11:00] probably, the young lady would probably put this on their shelf with all the other love spoons she had and eventually make a choice.
Um, but there was something about this as well. The The story was that if any, for any reason, the relationship was to break, perhaps the young man would go to be a soldier and go away at war, or perhaps one of them would die, or simply they would fall out of love with each other. The love spoon was broken.
And there's something about that ability to break an object and give it in the first place. Reminded us of the power of an artifact. Actually, you know, this isn't just a product. It has a deeper meaning. And we found that very, very fascinating. And then bringing it right up to the modern age with interactions.
Amazingly, the very first student I tutored at the Royal College of Art, um, went on to develop an app that kept relationships together, encouraged [00:12:00] relationships, encouraged people to understand each other better. It was sort of the antidote to Tinder. And it was about keeping relationships rather than just having another one and another one and another one.
Which we found very interesting. And she has actually, this is now a start up. And she went back to San Francisco. And she's doing very well. And ironically, we think she might be able to sell it to those kind of organizations like Tinder. Um, as a more sustainable product rather than just going on a date.
But there she was, she was, she was using AI or she said she was using AI. She was really just texting people, but they thought it was AI. Now it is AI, you know, encouraging you to dance around the kitchen when you get home, how to talk about money and religion and all those things that people forget to dial into their relationship.
So really interesting. And then rituals, of course. We have, um, the, the Pont d'Arc in Paris was the first bridge, I believe, where people started engraving their names or writing their names on padlocks. Padlocking it to the [00:13:00] bridge and throwing the keys into the Seine. Literally insane. And we thought, how interesting.
I mean, it's gone everywhere, you know, everywhere around the world. You'll find little groups of padlocks where people have, have You know, betrothed themselves to each other and done this in this very symbolic way. So, we had an artifact, we had an interaction, we had a ritual, we could see there was some work to be done.
It was possible. So, as I mentioned, the first thing we tried to do was define love in a meaningful way. Being service designers, we get post its out and sharpies and we put things on the wall and we categorize them all over. Um, and I was working with a philosopher writer called Mark Vernon, who's very well known, I think, in the philosophy world.
He's just written a book about Blake, which is coming out, um, this year. And he was a fascinating person. He knew nothing about design. I knew not enough about perhaps philosophy and spiritualism. I learnt a lot during this project. I, I just said, well, does it [00:14:00] start with the individual, you know, me? And he said, well, yes, to befriend another, first befriend yourself, as Aristotle said.
Wow, that's, that's great. Keep going. So he kept finding wonderful sort of phrases that helped us define. this framework for love. And so from our own well being, our own self regard, we went to we, this relationship, um, between two people. And I think it's fair to say that in the end, this, this, this relational part between two people was of less interest to it.
Not, not completely no interest, but we sort of felt that between Shakespeare and Taylor Swift, they'd sort of done it. There's a lot of stuff out there. Um, And of course, within, within relational love, there's everything from, you know, your rites of passage as a young person, coming out, um, getting married, getting engaged, getting married, getting divorced.
I mean, there's an awful [00:15:00] lot in there. Um, but we were sort of focusing, and Fetzer were, were guiding us to be more focused on perhaps on the societal and community side of love. So then we looked at us, which was really about community, about how our neighbours, how do we get on with our neighbours, how do we accept them.
Um, And funnily, personally, was I was particularly interested in this because here in the UK, we had the coronation of King Charles III last year. Was it last year or two years? I can't remember. Um, and, and that led to us being given the, given permission to close our street off from traffic so that we could have a party in the street, which we did.
And I discovered Hindu, Islamic, Sikh, every kind of religion in the street. Didn't know that at all. Been walking up and down it for 20 years. Hardly. We suddenly all came together an incredible cultural, you know, wonderful event. I've got to know everybody. And I just realized how powerful that neighborhood community [00:16:00] can be.
And in places such as the Sikh religion in India, where they feed everybody on a daily basis, there's some really interesting examples there. So we talked about our local communities, and then we talked about those broader, what we call them in our societal, you know, in a time of conflict, in a time of, Immigration, there's a lot of hatred out there, a lot of, you know, people who don't know anybody, but they just decide they don't like them.
And could we begin to detoxify society? A tough call, but could we look at that at least? And then finally we moved into nature, our love of nature. How does that allow us to reflect our place on the planet and love the system we live in, the earth, and the animals around us? Um, and, and absolutely at the, at the final end of that spectrum was, was spiritualism.
How do religions, how do cultures talk about love? How do they, um, act on it? Um, and, and really then going back to the beginning of what that means to, [00:17:00] to me. I think this was a very important framework and it was designed for the designers who were inviting onto the project to have something to, to work with.
And we said, you know, pick, pick a part of that spectrum or pick one particular type and start doing some research. Very important part of our design process, start imagining artifacts, rituals and interactions that would foster love in any of those situations. So I had a team of people, as I said, a majority of them were.
fairly recent graduates, most of them employed with jobs, so I was funding them for their free time to, to get involved with this project, which they all did incredibly. Um, we had a few other people who had a few tutors from the Royal College of Art like Judah and Dave and Melissa. We had a few external people like Dan, who's a designer at McLaren.
We had Rama, who was the head of the Helen Hamlin Foundation for Inclusive Design. Um, then we had people like Hamza, who was a specialist on AI. Cam is a [00:18:00] specialist on finance and economics. So a really broad bunch of people who came together. Some worked individually. Some worked in teams to develop some tangible ideas.
And it was a complete. Blank piece of paper, apart from that framework, also had a fantastic advisory team. And if you're doing a project, get a good advisory team. Um, we had Mohammed Mohammed from Fetzer. We had Ali, who was the founder of Lovewick, the app I showed you. Matt Lee, Human Flourishing Network in Harvard.
Olivier Commander, who's actually a speech writer for various people who've occupied the White House, as well as being a product manager at Google. Andrew Burrows, who's a designer. And now runs a company called Healthy Minds and Mark Vernon, the writer and philosopher. And they gave us a tremendous amount of advice as we went through.
My first problem was design. I was working with a completely new audience and they had no idea why people called designers should be involved with love. [00:19:00] Spiritualism, philosophy, whatever. They just thought it was, um, they thought we did this, we made handbags. And so we had to explain to people that design wasn't just fashion.
You know, from my course, service design, an output from the course, one of the projects was a way of helping Ukrainian refugees when they arrive in Britain, find all the videos. that explain to them what to do when they go through government bureaucracy, you know, by doing a plug in on a web browser.
That's design, right? Not a handbag, something highly practical and tangible and an intervention at a key time. That's design to us. And it's about that problem solving and redesigning systems. But, um, we immediately, We went into a three month program of developing some concepts and we had a big presentation together, lots of show and shares as we went through this every, every couple of weeks.
And, um, there was [00:20:00] tremendous ideas. It was a complete mess to try and create some structure around this. So the first thing I did was I asked one of the team. To do an illustration, um, as instructed by each of the designers as to what we call the hero moment. Where was the moment where love was fostered?
Where did something different happen? So as a set of illustrations, still quite difficult to understand, but at least they were consistent. And each one of these is trying to capture what is happening. in their concept that would lead to greater love. But I still was, um, not keen to share it publicly because I knew this project was going to, would raise a lot of questions and a lot of interest, which it has, but the whole point was to make something tangible.
So we went into research, we created prototypes, built things. We had a launch last May at the Royal Society of Arts. And here we have Jonathan Lever the COO, and Mohammed. And we had a fantastic panel of thinkers and doers [00:21:00] talking about the philosophy of love and the practicalities of love.
And we had an exhibition of all the work. At the end of it, we had Tim Brown, um, who's a famous designer, the chair of IDEO design company, who came in and said, Wow, you have got a movement here. So we said, Yes, we do. Um, and somebody, quite a few people in the audience said, this feels like the thing that comes after design thinking.
And I thought that was a wonderful thing to be told. And I think, um, I think in some ways that's very true. We are moving design as a discipline forward, though really our objective is to try and show the world how, how we can create things that foster love. So let me show a few examples. Um, 25 degree bench was I actually created before Project Love had started, but I, I'm an examiner at various design courses, and I saw this project, and Harvey, the designer, had been, um, troubled by poor mental health, seeing people with poor mental health, I should say, [00:22:00] wanting to do something about that, so he created a bench that's designed at 25 degrees at each end, To encourage people to talk, encourage them to, it's, it's the degree where you can't fail to catch the eye.
And so we, we included that in our sort of portfolio of, of, of designed objects and it's in way the most tangible one. But we went on and made a digital version of that as well. And there are currently, um, a number of public seats in London with secret QR codes on them and we invite people to go there and listen to.
And leave, um, through their mobile phone into the, into the cloud into a platform we've created stories of love. So you can listen to people's stories of love. They might be very. specific to that location, they might be broader than that. So this idea of storytelling and using the seat as a place to contemplate, to sit and, and think about other people's stories of love.
Storytelling was quite a theme of a few of the [00:23:00] projects. Um, two designers had been working on an art project of taking a story and turning it into an object by some means. And so they used AI to do that. And they used a story from their grandmother. They tagged it in AI, ran it through an open AI program that turned it into a digital image, an NFT, the first decent use of NFTs ever, and then you could get a 3D model, so they were creating 3D models of that so that you had a little Totally personal sculpture that was entirely connected to the words that were recorded in the story.
I think, I think a rather beautifully different, um, way of articulating love and keeping it visible, keeping it tangible in the memory. Project I worked on myself, and partly because nobody else wanted to do it, was a project around love. Um, after death, and that's what we're very interested in this, and I got [00:24:00] very interested in this, um, traveling to places like Vietnam and seeing a lot of ancestor worship and Mexico, Day of the Dead, that idea that you have a conversation with somebody who's passed, and, and seeing, you know, family members go to graveyards, for example, to remember their grandparents or whatever.
So I basically created a secular gravestone that you put in places of natural beauty. And you use it as a place to scatter your ashes. So people in many different cultures, you know, choose a place perhaps that was important to them and their loved one to scatter their ashes after they passed. And this becomes a place you can deliberately do that in a place of natural beauty.
And it has a digital component as well. You can leave a message, you can listen to their voice if you've uploaded it onto the platform. You could listen to other people who, who are there atomically, as it were. Um, if, if people want to, you know, if you want to tell people about your loved one who was, who was celebrated here, [00:25:00] then you can do that.
And this has had, I'm glad to say a lot of interest actually. And we're working with the National Trust who own lots of parks in Britain, um, to put these up in areas of natural beauty. Then we had a lot of stuff around respect and gratitude and compliments, um, and how can you compliment, we know people give compliments and they don't land, and we know they don't mean it.
So we had three or four students exploring, or graduates I should say, exploring how can you help people give compliments more meaningfully, how can you help people receive them, especially in the workplace. And Fetzer were very interested in the workplace as somewhere where love could be spread and scaled very quickly.
So, At the very crudest level, we have a set of compliments cards that you can give and leave on someone's desk. And you can say, if you want to give it to someone else, you may. So it's a sort of bartering system of compliments. And that led to an AI program, um, that that monitors your [00:26:00] emails and social media.
and gives you a kindness score and some tips about how to be slightly kinder when you send a message to somebody. Now this is a visualisation of a concept we have in fact just been approached by King's College London to develop this for their students as a well being tool. So all these ideas are beginning to come to fruition but they At this point there are visualizations, somewhat detailed visualizations, to show you the concepts as we go along.
Complete, um, other end of the spectrum really this project on nature. This was a student who had gone back to Milan in Italy and he bought a empty frame from a second hand store, put it on a an easel. Or a mounting of some sort in his local park and put a poem underneath it and hid behind a tree to see what would happen.
And people came to this thing and they were moved. They suddenly saw nature through this [00:27:00] empty frame. I mean, it's so simple, but it's so effective. And, and reflecting on your role in nature again and just seeing that. frame and seeing the view. It's not about selfies. It's not about anything. It's just about seeing nature in a new way by simply framing it.
And it was very powerful. He also went on to do a number of games, um, about learning about nature, about learning things that maybe surprise you about a local area or something like that, which he's now marketing. And we, and we have versions that you can download and there's. Another project very closely connected to nature was somebody who took kids out into various natural, um, places, environments and asked them to name the things that they didn't know the name of.
And there's, there's been quite a lot written, especially the British author Robert McFarlane has written about the lost words of the English language that we used to have for describing various things [00:28:00] in nature. So he's asking children to reinvent these words. Um, And things like running through the leaves is flumping or something and they were creating all these beautiful words and my, my personal favorite was, um, he asked him to describe the, the, the snails and slugs that suddenly appear on, on a pavement after a rainstorm.
I mean, I guess we've all seen that. It certainly happens in London. Big rainstorm, suddenly all these snails come out and start, and the kids called it the summoning, which I just thought was fantastic, this idea that they were all, they'd all been drawn to something by the rain. Um, And it's, it's just a beautiful, lovely thing that also encourages parents and children to work together.
And this has been trialed quite a few times now in parks around London, and just, you've got little workbooks and things, and you can just observe nature and make up words and share them. Some of that [00:29:00] stuff around societal, you know, the big difficult stuff about helping people accept new people. You know, Britain, like many countries, has had a lot of refugees.
One of the designers, one of the tutors actually at the Royal College, put together a football team of refugees who lived near him. And, and used it to teach them English so that they could start to have a role in society a little bit more. They were obviously traumatized. They'd come from appalling wars in Syria and around the world.
But they began to build a community and then he formed. He asked the local residents who live there to form a football team. So the refugees and the residents have started to play football. And in that sporting exercise, that activity, you know, bonds have grown, communities have grown, understanding has grown, their English gets better.
Um, and it's going crazy, this one. It's, it's taking off all over the country at the moment, this idea of refugees playing the local residents. And they also design their own [00:30:00] kits and design their own mottos and stuff like that, so there's a sense of community. One student from Turkey talked to us about a tradition, a cultural tradition, of drinking a particular drink and having this event called a mehane, where you suddenly recite poetry.
So we're having themed events with communities, diaspora communities and multicultural communities. on the topic of love. What does love mean to them? How can two different communities come together with a lot of drink and good times and music and, and food. And, and we, we've replicated that in Lisbon.
We've replicated it in Shanghai. And I can't remember a few other places where we're trying to repeat this to build up. conversations about love in, in communities, especially communities that are perhaps far from home. We had a bunch of projects that are kind of very digital interactions, um, incredibly simple app where on your mobile phone, um, you can just take a QR [00:31:00] code.
It's kind of a web app. And when you touch your screen, You get a little sort of heat map on it, and if somebody else is touching a screen, you'll see their finger as well, and you move around each other, and you can project this onto the side of a building, or onto a bus stop, or, you know, a huge space, and it sounds incredibly simple, but when you do it, you know, who knows which side of the Gaza Tel Aviv side you are, but you'll just know you're touching another human, and it was designed for use on public transport, and places You just need to be reminded, um, I, I worked with some students in Lucerne, in Switzerland, and one of the students, every morning, he leaves his home and goes one way, and his wife goes another way, and they're sitting on the train, and they just touch their phone with each other, and they see their touch.
I mean, it's so simple, but it's unbelievably impactful on them, and they love it. So I think, I think you could get the picture here that we're proving. that design can do stuff. And we decided that design can [00:32:00] shape what we mean by love, like compliments, for example. Um, sometimes it's a crucible, like the seat, you're sort of making things happen and sometimes it's more than that.
It's a provocation. You know, perhaps on the tube you'll, something will happen and you'll suddenly see invisible, um, anonymous people projected onto a wall and you realise that it's another platform somewhere else. These kind of interactive things just make you think differently about people, who they are.
We've been working with Matt Lee on how we measure love, individual and organisational and community wise. We had the London Design Festival with Lord John Byrd, who's the founder of The Big Issue, our street sheet here in, in in the UK. And we'd had a talk to the designers and we exhibited the work.
And we've had an unbelievable response to it. Um, we have a website, theprojectlove. com, with all the projects on it. And there's many more. We've had quite a lot of media, been on the BBC, blogs and stuff. And we've started a charity called Design for Love. [00:33:00] At this point, Um, the funding ran out, so I shall stop sharing now and just conclude that Designing for Love exists.
We've run some other projects. We've now had, you know, all sorts of partners come in, like King's College, who want to develop actual projects. Um, we're looking to where this goes now. We're creating a manifesto. We're creating some principles. We think we could do some training. Um, certainly when I've, I've been all over the world California, China.
Cross Europe talking about Project Love and it gets designers very excited, but they're only half the equation. It's about, you know, it's about the impact that design has on everybody else out there. That's what we're really trying to do. And I think we're in a little bit of a hibernation as the winter comes to an end and spring starts to root, we can feel The SAP rising in project love again, and, um, I'm absolutely determined to take it to the next stage.
We, we probably run another [00:34:00] invitation for designers to come and do another cohort of projects, um, and raise some funding so that we can again, exhibit and keep spreading the word. But there's so much we'd love to do, which is why I'm delighted that you asked me here to tell people about it.
Andrea Hiott: Well, it's very exciting and inspiring, thinking about design, which as you showed in your presentation is our everyday life in a way. Isn't it? do, have you found that it's hard? Do people have preconceptions? I mean, you showed the bag and often when people hear design, they think of fashion and it's about visions, visuals.
but it seems in what you just showed, it's an embodied. enactive ongoing relationship with the world something like that. Have you found it hard to Get people to understand design in that way is actually so connected to the way we think and act and are in the world.
Clive Grinyer: Absolutely. I have found it very hard and I've found it hard for the last 30 years.
But my good design career, I think, um, yeah, we are, [00:35:00] design has become designer, you know, it's become a luxury and yet, you know, I have to tell people, you know, every single thing around us. It's designed, it's a bunch of decisions that humans make, and it's not just the designer who makes them. I know as a designer, often very important decisions are made by other people in the food chain, if you like, of an organisation.
It's actually why I'm writing my book, which is called Redesigning Thinking. Which is trying to encourage people to use some of the tools they've designed themselves to think of the consequences of what they do a bit more formally. But design has traditionally probably been well understood. It certainly works in fashion, you know, it sells stuff.
You buy your car because you, you're attracted to it. It's, it's about designability. But it's so much more than that as well. It's about the social impact of what you do. It's increasingly about the sustainability. We have to design things to work for the planet. We have to design things, of course, to be economically viable.
Of course, we're not fantasists. [00:36:00] It's a very complex system when you design something, but it's sort of invisible to people. And if you talk about it, they think you're in a very niche. area that you are. Yeah. If you're a designer, you would say that, but I think we are all, we all play a role in design. And I think we all deserve a lot more agency in the decisions that are made around us.
And, you know, right now we're looking at AI and saying, hang on a minute, I think we should design AI to make sure it does what we want and doesn't just destroy us. So there's always decisions and where there are decisions. I think there are, there is design. There are ways. tools and methods and processes that we can use to do it better.
But they're decisions, you know, that affect us every day. Absolutely right.
Andrea Hiott: Yes. And we don't seem to ask what kind of orientation is going into the technology. I mean, this project, you're sort of taking a step back and saying, what are we going to design from what's going to be the intention or what's this wonderful app that you showed.
About the kindness and so on. It's, [00:37:00] it's remembering that our technology, that those are tools and that what we come to those tools with, we're going to get more of as we use them, that seems like a kind of a revelation that we need to have right now. It seems obvious, but it's not the way we think about technology, is it?
Clive Grinyer: No, I like the way you put that. And it reminds me, I mean, I often talk about design. I go into schools a lot as well, which I love because you're working with kids, you know, and I show them a Greek vase. I think design is an incredibly innate human activity. A Greek vase is shaped to be beautiful. It usually tells an incredibly important story.
It also pours oil really well, and it also stands up and doesn't fall over. So, you know, all these decisions that are around its function, around its social value, um, We've always done this. We do it in our products, in our objects, everything in our daily lives. But when something comes along like technology, we completely forget to do it.
You know, we forget to take control and we forget that we want things to be beautiful and to be usable and accessible for everybody, not just a [00:38:00] technician, you know. And somehow technology blindsides us and it always has done, you know. On the other hand, we can look to Um, fabulous examples of where design has allowed, let's say, technology to be really beneficial to us.
Um, and if I, I, if I remember the very first computers, they were horrible things that I didn't want on my desktop, that had little sort of green writing on a black background, they didn't Allow me to do anything, but the revolution in computing probably got quite a lot to do with Apple People like that has made it usable has made it desirable Not in a way we necessarily go, wow, look at that.
But the way we just use, you know, we just use it. Well, I turned my, um, Apple phone the other day into a simple phone for my, my mother, who's got Alzheimer's and you know, somebody, I didn't know it at the time in your Apple phone is an [00:39:00] assisted. way of using it that can work for somebody without a timer.
Somebody made that decision and did it. So there are delightful things too in technology, but um, especially when they're new, especially when they are first formed. We forget to design them, and that can have quite a serious consequence. And it can take time to catch up and stop that consequence.
Andrea Hiott: I think it's also this idea of emotion and love being Something we feel, something we experience. And I think it's wonderful what you said about how we might design our house.
Like we would have a certain vase or a certain, um, furniture or something because it makes us feel good or because we, we have a kind of experiential. Understanding that we want the house or the room to give us a good feeling. And we don't necessarily bring that to technology. I mean, you are with this project, but, I wonder how you've learned in your own life to, to talk about that or to, [00:40:00] to really understand that
design is also about how we're going to feel and when we're using our phones and stuff a lot of the time It's the feeling of addiction or something. I mean There's also just a kind of presence or attention of noticing Hey, this is a designed object and how does it make me feel and do I want to feel that way?
Have you seen that as part of this project to just to bring awareness to that whole aspect of what's going on?
Clive Grinyer: I do. I definitely do. I mean, ironically, one of the outcomes of this project is that people now have a stronger understanding of design, which is weird. You go in and say, I'm going to talk to you about love.
And this is stuff we've designed. And then they say, Oh, I see. Oh, that's design. Oh, great. Okay. You know, they begin to understand that, um, not simply imagining, but giving you something you can, you can interact with, you can react to, you know, suddenly goes from 2D to 3D. It goes to all those emotions start to come in.
Um, and they begin to see how you are making the future [00:41:00] tangible. You're making the possible tangible that becomes very important. I think design has always been about emotion because Because that's what sold it. You know, people, people want a product, an object, a building to be desirable. So people go into it and use it.
And in recent years, that's driven a lot of design activity where they're to make people want something that's not necessarily a great driver. And I, for a long time, I ran a series of lectures called lipstick on a pig, which was kind of what it says, you know, design was just making something beautiful at the end of the process.
My message is that. We need to bring it way upstream to really make sure we're making the right decisions and making the right things. But what was interesting about Project Love was we were, you know, we weren't making an object and then making it desirable. The object was desire, emotional resonance and compassion and tolerance and all [00:42:00] those words that I sort of packed around the word love to make it.
Tangible to people. Make, make them take it seriously, actually. Because if you just say love, they didn't take it seriously, they just thought it was romance. But if you frame it in a bigger context, you talk about societal compassion and tolerance, and then you show that design has created a whole load of artifacts that do that.
We make, we make progress. I think, you know, we begin to see that it's possible and we begin, I use this word agency with a bit of care, but I think people forget that we do get the world we deserve. And if we don't ask questions, if we don't understand that there are choices that other people are making on our behalf about how the world is, then we've almost, you know, politically we're very aware of that, but in a sort of The stuff around us, we're very unaware of it, it never occurs to us, so trying to help people grasp that and realize they have the right to demand [00:43:00] better, actually, I think is, is, is a desirable outcome of all this.
But at the end of the day, we're trying to design for love, and I think we've proven we can. We just want to do it more.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, just, just getting people to, to make the choice, to realize there's a choice in the items that they choose to buy that are designed, and, and to understand that, I mean, for, for example, right now we get sort of messages that maybe we don't want to be empathetic or we don't want love or whatever, and I think we can see that in The choices we make with our products.
and yeah, it's, it seems like you're bringing some attention to agency is a big word, but just to that it does start with these very basic choices that are very much everyday activities. And you said emotion is part of design and it always has been and that's true. And yet also you, you said how shocking it was to get this tender or to see that this was going to be about love.
So how is [00:44:00] it that possible that from the beginning, design is about sort of not, I won't say controlling our feelings or making us feel a certain way, but you definitely can't separate it. And yet. There was probably not until this project, as far as I know, a moment of actually bringing that word into, into the process.
How could that be?
Clive Grinyer: I think you're right. I'm going to answer that question this way. That I think the problem I always have with design is we, if we're not invited to the party, we don't go to the party. If someone doesn't arrive with a brief, you know, um, designers could have the solutions to every known problem.
But for some reason they wait because they need to be paid probably we need to wait I think what we did here, although there was a brief. There was a brief. It was so broad I'm putting this into a new type of design. I'm called I'm calling kind of pro activism It's where we're seeing a topic and we're just going for it And we don't [00:45:00] know what the outcome is going to be and we haven't got anybody lined up to to buy kind AI or buy my Monument or the bench or whatever it is But we're just gonna do it anyway, and by making it tangible and real, I think that pushes us forward much further than if we're just waiting for a brief.
So I think design has always waited for a brief, and therefore there's always a lag, and we put up with rubbish. Rubbish computers, rubbish whatever, until design starts getting involved because businesses perhaps realize they need to. I think the role for design to actually start solving stuff without being asked, and to show the way, is something we need to start to do.
And that's what excites me about this project. It's the most tangible example of that that I've come across, where we've just said, here's a topic, we're gonna go. We're just gonna go. Interestingly, before we did Love, we had had some conversations with people from Google and Alphabet and people like that and philosophers about [00:46:00] happiness.
And it's one of the reasons I got excited about the Love brief when it came. Past me. Happiness is, could you design for happiness? We, we kind of came to the conclusion we couldn't, we couldn't demand it, but we could try and remove unhappiness. We could remove barriers, we could make things equitable, and also design was good at, um, because it makes things tangible, you can test it.
You can see whether your hypothesis of what would this make people happy works or not. But to say we will design happiness, we felt that was a Too far, but with love, we didn't feel it was too far. We felt we had a chance because we're, we're provoking, we're stimulating, we're making an intervention and that's what design does all the time.
Um, and we iterate it to make sure it's the right one. We don't know when we start designing that we're going to increase love, but we're going to. Use our creativity to try some things out and make them real enough that we can find out if they work. And that was the story. That is [00:47:00] the story of Project Love.
And that I think will be the future of Project Love as well. We'll carry on doing that with more creative people, with more real people. And it occurred to me when you were talking just now, You know, the, we can go to my street and say, Hey, you, you, you design something, you close the street. That was a design intervention.
Let's do some more of those. Let's think of some other things. It's not just for me to do. It's for people to be given permission give themselves permission almost to, um, think about how we can. bring people together. And again, we tend not to do that. Social media doesn't do that. It might, it maybe it did when it first started, funnily enough, but of course it went somewhat off the rails.
I think we can all agree.
Andrea Hiott: Yes. And I think this is what one reason I want to share your project with everyone, because I do feel like it's almost a part, a sort of revolution in thinking. I mean, this, we talk about thinking and how we change our thinking a lot here and. What you're doing there, by being [00:48:00] proactive, by creating these, possible technologies before you have all the funding and everything, you're actually, I think people will see these and they'll think, wow, that's what's possible.
and then you can see that there is a consumer movement, that you can make money from these things because That's kind of what is always the problem, right? We need to make money and so we stay with this old framework that's gearing everyone towards addiction. But actually I think you can very much make money by designing spaces, technological spaces that people want to be in, in the way that you just showed in your presentation because when we think about what matters in life We think about those kind of moments like the ones that you were showing in your presentation, right?
those connections on the bench with humans or that moment by the lake that we had with someone we love that we now are going to memorialize or and if our technology connects with that then it seems so much richer than What happens now, where you have teenage girls that are so depressed trying to keep up with an [00:49:00] impossible Instagram feed, you know, this, I think people, if they had the choice, would rather choose this, but because of the way the system is, you know, you have to be sort of a rebel and just create it as you guys are doing to show that it's possible.
Clive Grinyer: Yes, that's entrepreneurially in a way, um, but we just don't know, you know, we're not even bothered about the business model at the moment. We just want to get the ideas out there. And I, I do see this as a movement, it's not something that I control as the director of Project Love, we just, it is a seed, you know, we don't care how many people want to try and do a Project Love project, I think it'd be nice if we were a library if you like, or um, a vessel where we can, people can find the ideas that people are doing, but I think um, It feels to me like something that just everyone could contribute to and we can share that and then that I love what you said actually about building almost building that consumer demand because people can suddenly see something that they hadn't thought of or didn't realize could exist.
And that's, that's very exciting, actually. [00:50:00]
Andrea Hiott: Right, those things don't have to be either or, we can have productive good business models that actually. Make us healthier. It's just that it's a huge inertia switch. Isn't it? It's everything's geared in another direction right now So it takes some creativity or or just showing people it's possible in the way that I think this project is doing
Clive Grinyer: Yeah, I think you're right.
Of course, there is a there is a wind behind us purpose led businesses are happening a lot People are making money for a good cause, or there's a social side to it, or there's an environmental side to it. And especially living in Europe, that's, that's becoming ever increasingly common, and sometimes even legislated for.
So, I think we're pushing at an open door, actually, where people want more ideas. I'd like to think so, anyway, I think.
Andrea Hiott: to me, it seems like a thinking shift, because what What you're doing is empowering people, too, and you're saying, Hey, look at around you at everything that you're using [00:51:00] is some form of design.
That's not a manipulative, a bad thing or a good thing, but it is, it's like part of the ongoing process, not something set aside. And it's not just optics, it's not just the visuals, it's actually a whole embodied interactive way of living, isn't it?
Clive Grinyer: I absolutely agree. I think some of the, I mean, we had so many ideas, you know, we couldn't, we couldn't um, visualize all of them, but there's a whole set of ideas that are things that are really embedded in everyday life, like the supermarket checkout and, you know, there's, you suddenly think there's an opportunity there.
There's an opportunity with this pen, you know, to make me love somebody. Um, it's and that's what we need. It becomes
Andrea Hiott: very exciting if you start to think of life that way.
Clive Grinyer: It does. It really does. Um, Matt Lee from Harvard, at the event we had at the Royal Society of Arts back in May last year. God, coming up a year.
Can't believe it. He, um, he pulled out his parking ticket from the airport that he'd left. I think it was Houston Airport in the US. [00:52:00] And, and he read it out and he said, um, you know, thank you so much for parking this parking ticket. We really hope you have a wonderful trip away. And, um, we'd really love To, you know, hear from you when you get back.
And then he stopped and said, of course, it doesn't say that. It says you will be fined 50 if you do anything. Blah, blah, blah. Is no love on that ticket whatsoever. But imagine if there was. And I thought, genius. It was brilliant. Yeah. Everything around us should be ingrained with love. And I think it would make a big difference.
Andrea Hiott: I think you're right, but I also feel a little bit of caution there, because I know, as you presented at the beginning, we can, this can become very saccharine, too, and I think that's one reason I talk to a lot of scientists, and people don't really like to talk about love, it makes them uncomfortable, or they think the word is too Saccharin sweet.
It's, you know, in fact, it's the most powerful force, but really being able to hold that in and, and deepen into that word [00:53:00] can be very hard because you also wouldn't want to just design stuff that sounds loving. You know, Oh, we have a nice day with a big smiley face. how do you deal with that?
Like with staying authentic?
Clive Grinyer: Well, nobody said it was going to be easy and it needs thought and, but again, I would say that the processes and methods of design that allow us to prototype, like those compliment cards, you know, we had a category of projects that were fantastic ideas, but weren't ready yet.
So, you know, a compliment card, they're still a bit cheesy. So we do it again. You know, and we, we hone in and we work with perhaps one particular organization and we find things that work for them. And that's the point of design. You, you go, when you design something, you do it from a point of sort of innocence and ignorance.
You don't want to be a specialist. You want to just observe and listen and try things out and fail, fail, fail, and then, and then finally you find something that works really well. That is the essence of design, actually. Not some sort of moments of inspiration or beautiful drawing. Um, it's hard [00:54:00] work and, and in a way that's.
We've only just scratched the surface. You know, I think some of the things we've done, we can see we've got mostly right. And some of the things, no, no, they're not. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you'd expect. And that's, that's great. So again, it's about scaling up and learning collectively about how not to make it saccharine and cheesy and have a nice day.
Compliments didn't mean anything to anybody. So we wanted to re engineer them.
Andrea Hiott: But I think you also show, you used the word relational as if it was romantic, but I guess from a philosophical point of view, this is all kind of intersubjective and relational. So that way that you described love, all of those are sort of relational, intersubjective, and the romantic thing, which I think you mean, would just be the card, have a nice day.
But what I heard you, what's really happening, if you could do these technologies that you just showed, is it's [00:55:00] becoming it's starting with the body and it's starting with the thinking, right? So, the person who's parking your car, if they're coming from a place that's, you know, I hope you have a nice day, if somehow the design of that whole situation is set up such that those are the rewarding and whatever situations, then you have a completely different design environment.
Clive Grinyer: You do, you absolutely do. And, I mean, I think, One of the problems with the relation, what I call relational love, the, you know, the romantic love, if you like, is that actually we've been working on that, well, humanity's been working on that quite a lot.
Andrea Hiott: Right. It's so important, so.
Clive Grinyer: I have, you know, we have, I got married, you know, there's a lot of ritual around it, and it doesn't always work, of course, and it would be really interesting to go into that realm.
Um, but I think because we wanted to break people's perceptions, we wanted to look at relationships in, in different, in different meanings as, as well. Um, but yeah, I think, I think it's just, as I say, I think it's just the [00:56:00] beginning of, of the project really where, Oh, I know what I was going to say that since doing this project, I mean, I, my personality and character and the way I interact with people has entirely changed.
Andrea Hiott: I was going to ask you that. You
Clive Grinyer: know, this is not a religious conversion or anything like that. But now I realize the importance of those moments of interaction and transaction or whatever they might be. And not just to Put that sort of normal behavior on of that can get aggressive very quickly, frankly, and and it really is very conscious with me now, you know, I really, I mean, I'm not, I'm not perfect.
There'll be times when I still get a bit edgy with an IT department, but, um, and, but now I'm thinking, okay, look, look, it's not, it's, it's not even going to serve me to be angry. You know, I need to flip. I need to. understand how can I help this person [00:57:00] help me in a way that doesn't just piss them off.
Andrea Hiott: That's beautiful. Completely
Clive Grinyer: changed me, really has. Yeah. Wow.
Andrea Hiott: Because, yeah, I think there's a way in which you start to realize that it actually does benefit you. So that's kind of that cost analysis thing too, where, you know, that either or of, is this, um, going to make money or is it actually going to be good for the world is a very old mindset.
And I think what you just described, I've noticed too, you start to realize if you design your day, so to speak, from the perspective that you just said, where you actually want to have. those kind of rewarding experiences. It's better for you too. It's not that you're just trying to be a good person.
It's actually, you're living a different quality of life. Have you noticed that?
Clive Grinyer: Absolutely. Absolutely right. Yeah. I'm calmer. I'm happier. People like me more.
Andrea Hiott: For me, that's kind of real power, right? And that, that also seems a bit of a contrast to the optics of the moment, which I think we're getting out of.
And a lot of people are moving towards a different [00:58:00] way. There's a I do think this is the right side of history, but that old way of designing or thinking of a star designer or thinking of design is very optics based. And. presenting something even if it's not how the actual experience of it is.
Clive Grinyer: Yes.
Andrea Hiott: When you said this might be after design thinking, I'm not sure what design thinking is, but do you mean something like that? Something like a different
Clive Grinyer: Yeah, so design thinking, um, for about the last 20 years has, has been the idea that you use the same processes and methods that I might have used to design a thing to design a more abstract concept like a business or a service, you know, wind it up.
Being head of service design, you know, service can be your health service, going to a doctor, or it can be your financial management, your bank, you know, it can be, there are many services in life and they are usually designed accidentally. So we're just using the same methods. But about 20 years ago, people like IDEO [00:59:00] design agency started talking about thinking like a designer.
So a lot of management consultants, you know, they get out the post its. They say, who are you designing for? And it's a human centered. And it's, to be honest, it was in somewhat devalued, I think out of misuse and, um, not really doing it that well. So it's, it's a ripe moment to say what's beyond design thinking.
But I think the idea that design for love. Project love is a set of examples of how you might do that. That you're, you're framing your transactions differently, that you're thinking about how you collaborate at work. Yeah, these are very practical things actually, but they could be very impacted by an approach that puts love at a predominant position.
Um, and, and one could immediately begin to see the. What that might achieve and how the world would be a bit different everything we've been talking about So I think this idea that it's beyond [01:00:00] human centricity in the sense of making my piece of technology usable You know making sure I can access my bank account to then add this Extra, extra layers.
You don't really want to see that. You want to see it as being ingrained, as we were talking about. It's
Andrea Hiott: almost going deeper or
Clive Grinyer: It is, isn't it? It's like
Andrea Hiott: Becoming more present to something. Yeah,
Clive Grinyer: exactly. We need some better language here, but you, you, you got it, I think. And it's, um, somehow that really does feel like, ooh, and it, and it, we're designing, we're making decisions with that framework for, for creating a better human environment, however we want to use the word love.
But that's why I keep talking about compassion and empathy and tolerance, because we can immediately see how that could make life easier and better, and us happier, ironically. Yes, and I think
Andrea Hiott: that's just as important part of your project that, and you introduced it, right? It's not only about looking at what design means, it's looking at what that word love means, and because that needs [01:01:00] redesigned too in a way, in the way that we use it, because it's so much Power and so much importance in that in our lives.
But the way we use that term doesn't reflect that. So I really like that whole dialogue that's ongoing too. is, is there any kind of practice in design of learning to think like a designer or because what you're doing is reaching out to all different kinds of people and and ways of life is is a practice based idea. Part of it too.
Clive Grinyer: Yes, well, I spend nearly all my time training people in. Service design, using design thinking to make better decisions in terms of your organization, whatever organization that is, a government organization or a business.
A lot of this came from fairly recently, actually, somebody saying that their daughter wanted to study design. You know, what did I think was the most important attribute they needed to have? And I think they're expecting me to say drawing or, you know, visualization or something like [01:02:00] that. And I. said empathy.
I said, if you were going to design something, you're not, you're not doing it for yourself. You're doing it for someone else. And if there was one thing I would say to every decision maker, you know, it's not about you. You are not the person you're designing for. Therefore, if you have empathy, you will be curious enough to go and find out who they are.
You know, and that's part of design research. We go and look at all the different people. We talk to them, you know, we say, what do you think of this thing? You know, what would you like? If I gave you a magic wand, what would you do? These are the things we do. Um, and that's really empathy. And then you hold that with you when you make a decision, you know, we have things called personas and archetypes where we see the people we were designing for to stop us thinking about ourselves.
And again, that is a sort of, a sort of empathy, empathy with others. And then when we create things, we measure them, not by what we think of them, but what that person thinks of them. So really there is that sort of, if I'm going to be really simplistic to [01:03:00] answer your question, it is kind of that it's all about.
Um, Not just thinking of yourself, thinking of the people you're doing it for, and you can be a government minister, you can be a business person not understanding your customer, wondering why they're complaining. You can be running a charity and not having people donating to you, whatever it is, or giving the wrong aid in the wrong way.
I think it almost always comes down to a mind shift. That it's about empathy. It's about thinking of someone else, not yourself. And yet, you know, we are very egotistical beings. Of course we are. And so it's tough to do that, but it's also delightful and fun and massively satisfying when your customer or your citizen or whoever it is.
Uses it and it works and it clicks and you go, yes, we designed it, right?
Andrea Hiott: and that's actually much more power to the to you a real power when you when you go that route I think you know, but I think that message you just said I just want to say thank you for saying that because it seems almost [01:04:00] It's not, it's not obvious today.
And, um, it's wonderful just to hear someone say that. And as you said, this is hard. I mean, this is especially right now to hold this space and actually say these things are important. And I think because it's hard, it's. Incredibly, incredibly important. And also I do believe it's the future. yeah, just in all our different ways, but definitely people who are thinking about design in all of us, as we think about designing our lives, right, or what we're doing with design.
So I just want to say thank you for that and for the project. And is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to be sure people know, or that you want to say, or that. It's on your mind?
Clive Grinyer: I don't think so. I, I just think that, you know, we have a website, The Project Love. I've been appallingly bad at writing newsletters, but I'm going to write one soon.
I'm very interested in building the community up. There is a place you can sort of leave your email and we can get in contact with you again. Um, or just, just find me, Clive Grunier, you just Google me, I pop up all over the place. Um, I, [01:05:00] because I've been writing a book for the last year, I haven't done other stuff. So I need to get back to that now. I'm just correcting the proofs of my book as we speak.
Andrea Hiott: That's exciting. It's also about thinking, redesigning thinking.
Is that still a
Clive Grinyer: lot of what I'm saying to you is in that book. It mentions project love. And I was thoughtful that I might now look at doing a second book. That's more specifically about, about designing for love. And that, that would make a lot of sense, but, I need to find some time. I actually, FETS have just commissioned me to write a chapter of a book.
Um, on, on love and, um, all these, all these things really, I'm going to be writing that chapter in the next week or so, so that, that will keep me going. and that I'll let people know when that comes out, but I think, I think there's a lot more to do here and it's, you know, as usual, it's time. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
It's, but it's very rich and you already have such a basis. It's not like you need anything new. It's just digging around and how to present this with. Yeah,
Clive Grinyer: but please, if anyone wants to get in contact with me, let's keep building the community and I'm, I'm hoping we [01:06:00] can perhaps have some sort of conference or event in the next, um, six to 12 months.
I think that will be really interesting. Um, it's just time and energy.
Andrea Hiott: that sounds exciting. Yeah, because I think there's a lot of people who are wanting this. Wanting to hear these kind of words and especially wanting to think about design in this way.
So, you know,
Clive Grinyer: thanks so much for Finding me and talking to me. It's been yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Well, thank you for what you're doing. I mean it from the from the most Authentic place. I'm really glad you're doing it and I hope you keep doing it
Clive Grinyer: I'd love to hear more about what you do as well. So perhaps all
Andrea Hiott: right, well, thanks so much clive
Clive Grinyer: Good luck to you and we'll speak again